Looking Back

It's December in what has been a VERY busy year. Throughout the month, I'm looking back at the past year and looking ahead to what I want to do in 2018.

Besides, of course, focusing on getting stuff done in that last-minute pre-deadline rush, the one I thought I'd grown out of when I was no longer taking formal classes. However. Deadlines and all that.

One joy of this year has been playing around on Instagram. I don't do fancy stuff--mostly just posting the same "here's the view from the window" I've always enjoyed capturing with my camera. But I've posted fairly often, and recently I've been posting snow pictures; in fact, some of the ones I've also uploaded here.

In any case, Instagram assembles the nine photos people have liked the most into one shot. Here's mine:

It surprised me to see the photos from earlier parts of the year--even just earlier this autumn. Why? Because the landscape out EVERY WINDOW now is so very different. It's all snow, all the time. The last part of the world outside our windows to change is the lake ice--which is growing ever farther out into the bay.

I spent a little time last night looking at the earliest photos I took on this phone (from March or so), and (of course) trying to delete some (always too many photos). It was really nice to take a scroll/stroll back through autumn, summer, and the fifteen minutes that constituted spring. And it was a nice complement to the calendar- and to-do-list-based looking back I've been doing to prepare for 2018.

Happy memories. "Learning moments" and times of satisfaction. Unexpected, ephemeral flashes of brilliant wonder. Determination. Gratitude. All parts of 2017--and all elements that I might otherwise have forgotten.

CRADLE OF THE DEEP

Marion Agnew is an editor and writer who lives and works in Shuniah, Ontario -- a little slice of paradise just outside Thunder Bay. Email her at agnewmarion [at] tbaytel [dot] net. On Instagram, she's @marionagnew